Ageism is alive and well in Canada thanks to neoliberal thinking

 In Canada in the 1980s-early 1990s, a subtle change started to take place in society as neoliberalism’s creeping ideological rhetoric entered the public domain. The mantra of “individual (or personal) responsibility” and “choice” could be found over and over again in everything from academic publications to the mainstream press. This rhetoric was accompanied by a political-economic shift that included the privatization and profitization of many of Canada’s social welfare programs.

The term ageism has had different interpretations since it was first coined by Robert Butler in 1969 when he described “age discrimination or age-ism [as] the prejudice by one age toward other age groups”. A current definition provided by the World Health Organization in 2020 states that ageism is “the stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against people on the basis of their age” (2020). Ageism is widespread across the globe and in most societies such as Canada it “is the most socially ‘normalized’ of any prejudice and is not widely countered – like racism or sexism”.

Media has helped to foster ageism through the negative stereotyping of older people, resulting in age discrimination in the workforce, and the marginalization, and even exclusion, of older people in their communities, which in turn “have negative impacts on the health and well-being” of the older population.

An earlier Canadian survey produced for the International Federation on Aging, The Revera Report on Ageism (2012), reflected the information provided by the World Health Organization 2020- 2021. While any age group can be the recipient of ageism, the two groups most singled out today are the young and the old, but with the greater proportion of ageism focused on older adults. The Revera Report found that ageism is the most tolerated form of social discrimination in the country, more so than either gender or race-based prejudice. It revealed that the most common forms of age discrimination are: 1) treating seniors as if they are invisible; 2) acting as if they have nothing to contribute; 3) assuming they are incompetent; and 4) allowing ageism to take place in the workplace and housing. The Revera Report also found that in general, 89% of Canadians hold a negative view of aging, while Generations X and Y are the most likely group to have formed negative opinions on aging, which includes perceptions that people 75 and older are unpleasant, dependent, grumpy, and frail (p.10). A more recent Revera Report on Ageism published in May 2016, found that ageism “continue[d] to be widespread in Canada” and is still the “most tolerated form of social prejudice in Canada, with more than 42% of Canadians citing ageism, which is double to that of racism (20%) and sexism (17%)”.

Since the early 1800s, old age in our culture has been perceived in either a positive or negative light based on a number of factors:

1)    “a ‘good’ old age was depicted by good health, virtue, self-reliance and salvation;

2)    a ’bad’ old age reflected sickness, sin, dependence, decay and disease”

Victorian morality also associated ‘bad’ old age with sin, as well as decay and dependence. Prior to the industrialization of the 1800s-1900s, a primarily rural economy relied on experience that came with age, enabling older (and healthy) adults to fall into the ‘good’ old age category that had value within the society. The attitude toward ageing changed with the increasing industrialization which relied on strength and speed, qualities found in young workers that would increase productivity and profit.

At the same time, the ‘Cult of Youth’ developed in Hollywood in the 1910s-1920s became ingrained in the consciousness of North Americans and much of the Western world. This idea reinforces the belief that old age should be avoided regardless of the consequences. Association with older people is discouraged based on the grounds that doing so would “devalue” the younger person in contact with the aging individual.